Climate Change: Simple, Serious, Solvable
Coming in 2027, free to read online
Climate change is simple: the physics is straightforward and inexorable. It's serious: continuing to burn carbon on a large scale would severely harm people and reverse centuries of economic progress. And it's solvable: we already know how to decarbonize the global economy, and we estimate that doing it will be far cheaper than the alternative, especially in the long run.
What's in the book
1Simple, Serious, Solvable: the whole argument in one chapter
Simple: How it works
Climate and climate change follow from basic physical principles that anyone can understand.
- 2Energy and Radiation
- 3How Climate Works
- 4How Climate Changes
- 5Past Climate Change
Serious: Why it's bad
The consequences of continuing to power the global economy by combustion are unacceptable.
- 6Recent Climate Change
- 7Climate Scenarios
- 8Future Climate Change
- 9The One-Way Thermostat
- 10Climate Justice and Ethics
Solvable: What we can do
Effective solutions are entirely feasible.
- 11Economics of Fire
- 12Reinventing Fire
- 13Cleaning Up the Mess
- 14Planetary Prosperity
- 15Policy, Power, and Politics
- 16Stories We Tell
Explore
Models
Seven small climate models that run in your browser. Move a slider and watch the planet answer.
News
Climate and energy stories I share with my students, newest first, each with a one-line note.
Data
Open data and tools from NASA, NOAA, the IPCC, Copernicus and others, for exploring the numbers yourself.
About the author
I've been teaching climate change to undergraduates for about twenty years: at Colorado State University, at Yale, and on Semester at Sea, teaching from a ship as it sails around the world. This book grew out of that course.